The Beatification of Óscar Romero

In his home country of El Salvador, the Archbishop Óscar Romero, who was assassinated, in 1980, for his outspoken opposition to the country’s military regime, is still a divisive figure.

Photograph by Alex Bowie / Getty

On May 23rd, thirty-five years after his assassination, Óscar Romero, the Archbishop of San Salvador, will be beatified. The ceremony is the step just prior to sainthood, so a big celebration is expected in El Salvador, although the cheer will not be unanimous. The country is still deeply divided between the rightist and leftist political forces that emanated from its civil war, in the nineteen-eighties, and Romero, identified with the poor, was a divisive figure who declared war on inequality and a criminal military regime.

When I was a child, in the late seventies, Monseñor Romero was an omnipresent figure: on the front pages of all the newspapers, on TV and radio, in every adult conversation. Every Sunday, when Romero celebrated Mass in the cathedral, Salvadorans who could not attend tuned in to the radio station that broadcast his homilies. From the pulpit, Romero lectured politicians, soldiers, popular organizations, and guerrillas alike; he urged them to renounce violence and he demanded social justice. He reminded the Salvadoran élites that peace could not be achieved in an unequal society. He accused them of maintaining “insulting” privileges through repression. He usually read detailed reports about people who had been killed or disappeared, and on massacres committed by the Army. And then, on March 24, 1980, a sniper from a right-wing death squad shot Romero in the heart while he was officiating Mass in a chapel in San Salvador.

Romero’s ecclesiastical career before he became Archbishop was that of a shy, traditional priest, averse to politics and most comfortable inside the walls of his temple. But starting in the late sixties, throughout Latin America, thousands of Catholic priests and laymen were traveling to remote villages to organize peasants and workers, following the directives of Vatican II and the 1968 Conference of Latin American Bishops, in Medellín, Colombia, which established the preferential option for the poor, asking all Catholics to act against the structural problems that had so many people in poverty. Medellín asked Christians to help the poor form Christian Base Communities, where they would talk about and engage in the struggle to dignify their lives.

This was no small transformation. For centuries, the Church had been telling the poor that their sufferings were God’s will, but now young priests were coming to rural areas to tell them that an unjust political and economic system, not God, was to blame for their miserable condition. God wanted them to live decent lives in this world, before they went to Heaven. The church was there to help them. It was a radical change, a revolution. The poor now had religious support to organize and defend themselves against the landowners, the oligarchy, the wealthiest people in one of the most unequal regions in the world, and against their repressive military apparatus.

Romero’s predecessor as Archbishop of San Salvador, Luis Chávez y González, was a strong supporter of peasants and workers’ organizations. He moved nuns from urban schools to rural posts and called for civilians to bring Vatican II everywhere. He opened a small office at the San Salvador archbishopric to provide legal aid to the poor. (Under Romero, that office would become Tutela Legal, El Salvador’s main center for denouncing massacres and disappearances.) Local newspapers, owned by the ruling families, complained about Chávez y González and called him a communist. So in 1977, when he reached retirement age, the élites saw a golden opportunity to put the Salvadoran church back on track.

Oscar Romero’s aversion to politics earned him the appointment as Archbishop. By then, the military, which had been ruling the country since 1931, had staged another electoral fraud and was strongly repressing popular movements. It was chasing, capturing, torturing, and killing priests who organized peasants in the rural areas, especially in the coffee farms owned by the wealthy. Just one month after Romero’s inauguration, one of those priests, Rutilio Grande, a Jesuit who headed a rural parish, and who was one of Romero’s closest friends, was killed by state agents.

Much to everyone’s surprise, the new Archbishop proved to be a determined man. He cancelled Sunday Mass throughout the country and convened the Salvadoran Church in the cathedral for a single Mass; there, he publicly blamed the government for Grande’s death and demanded justice. A couple of months later, he refused an invitation to the inauguration of the new President, General Carlos Romero, a first for a Salvadoran Archbishop, and refused to meet with Government officials if they would not investigate and prosecute the crime.

In a letter to Cardinal Sebastiano Baggio, the Prefect of the Congregation of the Bishops in Rome, Romero explained his decision: “I felt it was my duty to translate into words and contemporary evangelical gestures the brave old attitude of the Saint Bishop of Milano, Ambrosius, when he did not allow Emperor Theodosius to enter the church, demanding a previous public penitence for his guilt in unjustifiable killings.”

The Vatican nuncio (ambassador) to El Salvador, an Italian bishop named Emanuele Gerada, who had successfully lobbied for Romero’s appointment, was now furious with him. He wrote to Rome that the new Archbishop had severed the church’s relations with the government. Half of the Salvadoran Episcopal Conference—the local Catholic hierarchy, composed of six bishops, including the Archbishop—accused Romero of treason and swore to destroy him. One of them was the military chaplain.

During those days, Romero received his first death threats, from death squads with names such as La Falange and the White Warriors Union. They sent him letters warning that he was at the front of “a group of clergymen that at any moment will receive thirty bullets in their faces and chests.” It became common knowledge that Romero could be killed at any moment, as so many other priests had been.

Beginning in March, 1978, Romero sat in front of a microphone almost every night and recorded a diary, offering his reflections on a variety of subjects, from his regular ecclesiastical duties to the political turmoil and violence that were engulfing El Salvador. This diary, along with the transcripts of his homilies, his pastoral letters, and his correspondence with the Catholic Church hierarchy in Rome, constitute the main body of work studied by the Congregation for the Cause of the Saints, which is in charge of the process of canonization.

Romero was not a theologian and never considered himself part of Liberation Theology, the most radical Catholic movement born of Vatican II. But he shared with the liberationists a vision of a Gospel meant to protect the poor. “Between the powerful and the wealthy, and the poor and vulnerable, who should a pastor side with?” he asked himself. “I have no doubts. A pastor should stay with his people.” It was a political decision, but justified theologically. All of his writings include extensive biblical references, Church documents, and Papal quotations to support his assertions.

In October, 1978, Karol Wojtyla, a Polish Cardinal who had heroically resisted the Nazi occupation and guided the Church of Poland under the attacks of a communist regime, became John Paul II, a Pope ill-prepared to understand the situation on the other side of the Atlantic, where the oppressive military regimes were not communists but rightists—supported not by Moscow but by the other Cold War power, the United States.

On May 11, 1979, John Paul II hosted the Archbishop of San Salvador for a brief meeting in Rome. News had reached the new Pope of the deep divisions in the Salvadoran Church. Romero explained how hard it was for him to work with bishops who acted in compliance with the Salvadoran military regime, which was systematically targeting his clergymen. By then, three priests who were close to Romero had been killed by state security forces, and dozens of others had been tortured, expelled, or banned from entering the country. Yet the conservative Salvadoran bishops were blessing military tanks, blaming Liberation Theology for the military attacks against the Church, and speaking against Romero to Rome.

Romero recorded in his diary: “[John Paul II] reminded me of his situation in Poland, where he had to face a non-Catholic regime with which the development of the Church had to be done in spite of such difficulties. He gave much importance to the unity of the episcopate and, remembering again his times in Poland, said this was the main problem, to keep the episcopal unity.”

His Holiness was wrong. The most urgent matter in El Salvador was not fostering episcopal unity but stopping brutal repression by the military and the death squads and averting a civil war.

Less than a year after that meeting, on March 24, 1980, Romero became the first Catholic bishop killed in a church since Thomas Becket was murdered in Canterbury, in 1170.

His assassination was organized by a paramilitary death squad headed by Mario Molina (the son of the former President Colonel Arturo Molina) and a former intelligence officer named Roberto d’Aubuisson. The squad was protected by the military command and financed by wealthy Salvadorans. On the night of Romero’s killing, the quiet of San Salvador’s wealthiest neighborhoods was broken by fireworks and shotguns, sounds of celebration.

Joaquín Villalobos, a former commander of the Farabundo Martí Liberation Front, wrote recently, “Before they killed Monseñor, we were tens of guerrilla fighters; after it, we were thousands.” A twelve-year war between the F.M.L.N. and the regime erupted.

For decades, Romero was not even mentioned in El Salvador’s official narrative. Something similar happened in Rome. His beatification is a sign that Pope Francis is determined to undo the work of his predecessors, John Paul II and Benedict, and that Rome is, once again, changing course.

The Church has now declared that Romero was killed because of his faith. Yet the death squads, the military, and the wealthy financiers of his killing all professed to be followers of Christ. Some of them, still alive, are active members of church communities, give lots of money to Catholic conservative organizations, send their kids to Catholic schools, and never miss a Sunday Mass. They say that they have God to thank for all their possessions (never mind their corruption, exploitation of the poor, repression, impunity, and historical position as the effective owners of the state). On religious grounds, they firmly oppose abortion, gay marriage, and birth control. They were not opposed to killing thousands of people who challenged their point of view. And, during the reigns of John Paul and Benedict, they also had leverage in Rome.

Soon after the Argentinean Cardinal Mario José Bergoglio was named Pope Francis, he declared he had “unblocked” the canonization process for Romero, effectively admitting that the process had been blocked by the hierarchies of the previous papacies. Early this year, Monsignor Vincenzo Paglia, the bishop of the Italian diocese of Terni and the official postulant of the cause for Romero’s sainthood, revealed that three Salvadoran ambassadors to the Vatican—he refused to name them—had actively lobbied against the canonization process, arguing that Romero was still a politically divisive figure in El Salvador and that his elevation to the altars could be manipulated by the leftist groups.

Salvadoran conservative groups argued that Romero was killed for his “subversive” political stances in the context of a civil war—a necessary narrative, especially since the organizer of the killing was also the leader of the conservatives, and they still revere him.

On the other side, supporters of Romero’s canonization have tried to strip his legacy of any political controversy. Romero, they argue, acted strictly based on the Gospels. He was killed because of his faith.

Neither of these accounts is accurate. Romero was indeed deliberately and intensely political. He discovered the power of the archbishopric and decided to use it to influence the Salvadoran political process in favor of the victims and against the military regime. But his direct confrontation with the established powers can’t explain his assassination. He was killed because those powers thought they could get away with it. And they did, because Salvadoran history, for them, was a lesson in controlling the system through repression.

Because, as the Archbishop wrote a few months before his death, in one of his pastoral letters, “There is an institutionalized violence expressed in a political and economic system that believes progress is only possible through the use of the majority as a productive force conducted by a privileged minority.” Violence, he warned, would not end until such structural problems were addressed.

Not long before his assassination, Romero sent a letter to President Jimmy Carter, asking him to block a military-aid package for the Salvadoran Army. He made the case that the aid was only going to be used to inflict further harm on the Salvadoran people, that political power was in the hands of “the unscrupulous military who know how to repress the people and promote the interests of the Salvadoran oligarchy.” It would be unjust, he continued, “if the intrusion of foreign power were to frustrate the Salvadoran people, or to repress them and block their autonomous decision.”

One day after Romero’s assassination, the package was approved by the U.S. Congress. And the twelve-year war engulfed El Salvador.

In 1992, the U.N. brokered a peace agreement between the government and the F.M.L.N. guerrillas, which put an end to the war. It was considered an exemplary accord. By then, nearly a hundred thousand people had been killed. The F.M.L.N. became a political party and has governed El Salvador since 2009, when it put an end to twenty years of rule by Arena, the rightist party founded by D’Aubuisson.

Due to criminal violence, mostly related to gangs and drug cartels, El Salvador has one of the highest homicide rates on the planet. Poverty, one of the structural problems so frequently pointed to by Romero, has decreased only because a third of Salvadorans have left El Salvador, and many of them send money back. Corruption has been rampant under both rightists and leftists. It’s a good time, it seems, to reread the teachings of the now celebrated Archbishop.

“With certain societies,” Romero said in a sermon, “God feels he has failed.”

Carlos Dada is the founder and editor of El Faro, an online news site based in San Salvador. He is currently a fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.